In August 1967, Lyndon Johnson announced that he was sending 45,000 more troops to Vietnam. Black power advocate Stokely Carmichael called for violent revolution in the streets. Beatles manager Brian Epstein died from an overdose of sleeping pills. But around water coolers, the hot topic was what Billie Joe McAllister and his girlfriend threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

The mystery created by Bobbie Gentry in her debut single “Ode To Billie Joe” cast a spell over the entire country. Set to a backing of spare acoustic guitar chords and atmospheric strings, Gentry’s sensual, Southern-fried voice relates the story of two Mississippi teenage lovers who share a dark secret that eventually leads to the boy’s suicide. And over 40 years later, despite cinematic details in the song’s lyric, we still don’t know exactly what happened up there on Choctaw Ridge.

Bobbie Gentry was born Roberta Lee Streeter on July 27, 1944 in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. In the few interviews that she gave, Gentry touched briefly on her rural upbringing, saying, “We didn’t have electricity, and I didn’t have many playthings.”

She did have music though. From the gospel sounds of the local Baptist church to old folk songs, Bobbie was fascinated. “My grandmother noticed how much I liked music, so she traded one of her milk cows for a neighbor’s piano,” Gentry said. Taking to the instrument immediately, she wrote her first song at age 7, a ditty called “My Dog Sergeant is a Good Dog.” After her parents divorced, 13-year-old Bobbie moved to Palm Springs, Calif. with her mother, who quickly remarried. With the family’s improved fortunes, Bobbie taught herself guitar, banjo, bass and vibes. As a teenager, she started playing gigs at a local country club, taking her stage name from Ruby Gentry, a movie about a poor, rurual seductress.

After graduating high school, Bobbie, by then a raven-haired beauty, went to Vegas, where she worked in a Folies Bergere–style review, dancing and singing. In the mid-’60s, she moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA, finally landing at the Conservatory of Music, where she studied composition and arranging. A demo tape she made ended up on the desk of Capitol Records A&R man Kelly Gordon.

“Ode” was recorded on July 10, 1967 at Studio C in the Capitol tower. Accompanying herself on guitar, Bobbie nailed a keeper take in 40 minutes. Arranger Jimmie Haskell told MOJO, “I asked Kelly, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘Just put some strings on it so we won’t be embarrassed. No one will ever hear it anyway.’ The song sounded to me like a movie—those wonderful lyrics. I had a small group of strings—two cellos and four violins to fit her guitar-playing. I was branching out in my own head for the first time, creating something that I liked because we thought no one was ever gonna hear it.”

The finished version of “Ode” was over seven minutes long. Capitol edited it down to a more manageable four minutes and stuck it on the flip side of “Mississippi Delta.” But those were the days when DJs still had minds of their own, and as in the stories of so many classic hits, the B-side became the A-side.

It sounded like nothing else on the radio, Gentry’s husky voice inviting listeners into a world that was as dark and exotic as a Flannery O’Connor story. Not long after the song’s debut, the water cooler talk started.

As Gentry told Fred Bronson, “The song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty. But everybody seems more concerned with what was thrown off the bridge than they are with the thoughtlessness of the people expressed in the song. What was thrown off the bridge really isn’t that important.

“Everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge—flowers, a ring, even a baby. Anyone who hears the song can think what they want, but the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. They sit there eating their peas and apple pie and talking, without even realizing that Billie Joe’s girlfriend is sitting at the table, a member of the family.”

In its first week of release, “Ode” sold 750,000 copies, knocking “All You Need Is Love” out of the top spot on the Billboard chart. It stayed there for four weeks. The song won Gentry three Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist (she was the first Country artist to ever win in this category).

The enigma of her best-known song is nothing compared to that of Bobbie Gentry herself. In the early ’70s, she was riding high—headlining in Vegas, duetting with Glen Campbell on several hits, hosting her own TV series. Then around 1975, after contributing music to a movie based on “Ode,” she simply checked out. She has not been heard from in over 35 years. All requests for interviews, recordings and performances have been denied. She is said to be living in the Los Angeles area.

Most of these posts are well-written, thought out remarks which make me wonder if any song has ever had the impact of OTBJ. I have my own thoughts and as an author hope to someday write a SS combining my thoughts and reveal ‘my’ mystery. I believe because BG was so intuit and grew up in the days of Emmett Till and in Mississippi in the cruel days of hate, prejudice and bigotry that OTBJ was in fact a metaphor of the “times”. It will forever be playing in my mind as a little girl growing up in my own city in Alabama of hate and bigotry. For anyone of you from the “North”, and not aware of a day in the life of a southern girl, and not because I wrote it, check out THE SOUTHERN CROSS, a novella written as an apology from me to the men and women who suffered.

I sing this song and the listeners always love it. I think half the entertainment value is seeing if I can hit the low C on the word ‘bridge.” It has moody, mysterious, yet ordinary life lyrics that are fun to interpret. It has soul!

I cringe when I hear folks say the racist south or that’s the way it was in the south back then….Like only in the south were black folks treated with no respect…The racist ting to this song is news to me…I guess when Little Walter was beat up out side Chess records in Chicago that was the south part…When Chuck Berry was arrested in New York for driving around with white girls that was south new York….Now ODE TO BILLY JOE has a racial overtone???..Please I bet Bobby got out of the biz because of the same bs I am reading here…Hell if I had done as well as she ,I would have left too…She is not the first star who had a brain bigger than a ego….But she is one of the few who had a brain big enough to leave the ego behind….I bet she has been very happy with her life…Not having to deal with the simple mentality that only those from the south are raciest….It is not what was thrown off that bridge in ole Miss ,way down were the moss grows and the Possums play in the segregated south…But that 10 per cent of a 1 million dollar movie that made over 50 million plus She had the song…Yo all have a nice day ,,ya here..

As a young man growing up in L.A , listening to all types of music I was always interested in the songs that tell a story and when I first heard this song the pictures it painted in my mind were so amazing . I was disappointed in the movie because it never quite matched the one I already had in my mind . The place I imagined is filled with ,country folk , picture shows , hard work , double names
and mystery !

Rolling Stones new list of the top 100 top songs in country music includes two Bobbie Gentry songs. Fancy checks in at #82 and Ode to Billie Joe #47 Why has she yet to be inducted into any of the national Halls Of Fame?

Flowers. It makes no sense otherwise. The movie had NOTHING to do with the song…just a pot-boiler of a movie of the week. I would love to know what additional verses Bobby Gentry had in mind in the 7 minute original version of the song that was cut down to the hit length. Does anyone know?

I was southern, enjoying my first year as a teenager when this song started playing on the radio. I didn’t know it then I realize now how proud I was at the time for a southern singer/songwriter to have such a powerful song on the radio. When Bobbie Gentry was on television singing this song, everything and everyone stood still in our house. We watched her and felt she was one of our own, southern and telling a great story. Doors didn’t slam shut, voices were quiet, feet didn’t move and eyes were glued to the old television set, when she sang this song.

I was working for Capitol in Chicago when OTBJ came out and spent a magical evening sitting on a hotel room floor singing along with Bobbie as she strummed that sweet little 3/4 Martin — just the two of us. Never thought about asking what was thrown off the bridge — she was, and I’m sure still is, a warm, approachable and supremely talented singer and songwriter.

Really?? You hung out with her? I was a little girl from Chicago when the song hit the radio & I also remember seeing her on TV. She was beautiful, but more importantly, I was struck by the song for years! Her soulful, southern accented voice truly touched me. The movie came out when I was 13 or 14 & I believed it was the “truth”. I realized otherwise when I got older. How cool that you knew her. I swear I was born 10 years too late! Please share anything you talked about with her!!

music and movie tend to tell a tale of forbidden romance, a reckoning of the truth and ages – the movie used a rag doll or teddie bear, which may have been symbolizing loosing the happiness of being youthful, and not being able to have the boy she loved…

I remember the song well. BG’s throaty voice and the image of the people at that table who can’t see the impact this news is having on her. I always took it that the ‘something’ was a stillborn child. Billie being gay never, ever, entered my mind. What Anna is saying about Emmett Till in 1955 I don’t believe could ever have a connection. These people were poor white folks in an era of segregation and would not have cared a ‘lick’ about some poor black kid chucked into a river. They would not have even heard about it because the press would have given it minimal coverage, if they even reported it at all.

Cynthia Pease, ironically, I have also been researching The Reconstruction Period through the Civil Rights Movement and how the effects are still manifest in present day attitudes. I would love to compare our respective syllabi. Anyway, back to the topic. I have always thought the basis for the bathos in this song was manifest in the nonchalant conversation taking place at the table and not so much about the drama that transpired up on Choctaw Ridge. Although, considering the year that this song was released, and Ms. Gentry’s southern heritage, I think you may be on to something with the possibility of racial overtones. Happy reading

Cynthia I’m with you: The fact is that someone DID throw a Black boy off that bridge and no one cared in 1955; but I was a 12 y/0 Ohio girl when this song came out and, though I’m Black, I barely understood all of what happened to Emmett, other than something (someone) hateful happened to him. At the time I believed a dead baby had to be what was thrown off that bridge. Being a child born in the 50’s I knew that if those teens threw a baby off that bridge then they’d have to also end their relationship because, after all, they’d been given a second chance. Thus, I concluded that Billy Joe committed suicide due to losing his girl.

When the movie came out the theater in Yazoo City ran a contest. It was a rag doll that was thrown off the bridge. It was either that she grew up and didn’t need it anymore or did it in honor of Billy Joe jumping off committing suicide.

Robert: Carol Burnett ended each show by tugging on her left ear, which was a message to her grandmother (Nannie) who raised her. This was done to let Nannie know that she was doing well and that she loved her. During the show’s run, Burnett’s grandmother died, but Burnett continued the tradition of tugging her ear at the end of every show as a tribute to Nannie.

I think unconscious cruelty would be demonstrated by the family knowing or realizing she was Billy Joe’s girlfriend, and choosing selfishly to deal with it by pretending they didn’t know. She probably believed they did know. Imagine a family with gorillas like that in the house!

Does anyone think it may have been a draft card they threw off the bridge?

Just recently I have been studying the civil rights movement right back to reconstruction. While reading the book by Emmett Tills’ mother, I kept thinking about Tallahatchie Bridge and where I’d heard it before. Finally came up with it and was interested to see that other people thought of it. As teens we did our share of speculating about what was thrown off the bridge; it has more resonance for me now because one way or another, white folk in Tallahatchie County went on eating and living and not caring that someone DID throw Emmett into the Tallahatchie River after torturing him.

i can’t believe it. the film footage was shot by my father for her short-lived tv show. i haven’t seen it in over 40 years. there was much more to it. we spent 4 days with her and her family where she grew up. kelly gordon was with her, and as he and i (me only 12 at the time)had little to do while filming, we hung out together, riding dirt bikes and a mule of theirs…she was a mult-instrumentalist and her ‘whiskey voice’ sounded even better in person…… in her gran’s living room… at the piano her gran bought from the proceeds of the sale of that cow….i was in heaven

Anna wrote: “But the song is about ‘Billie Joe’ even though the movie calls it ‘Billy Joe.’ I’m unclear that the original Billie Joe was the male, or that the singer’s character is female (even though it is sung by a woman).”

It’s my understanding that the song was always meant to be called “Ode to Billy Joe,” and that the feminine spelling “Billie” was the result of a record-label typo.

The local scuttle butt here (where Jim Stafford now has a theater) is that he was cruel to Bobby Gentry, convincing her to retire out of jealousy. Good she left him. I doubt there is any way OtBJ could be about Emmit Till. The South was still segregated and they wouldn’t have known. 2.) They wouldn’t have cared. They worked too hard and had too much drudgery to worry about someone else’s mistakes. The proof is in the song. Most likely, given the family’s familiarity of Billy Joe, he was a family member, a cousin perhaps, they were underage and had an inbred child.

One of my all-time favorite songs! The pictures in the song – you can just see the dinner table, passing the peas, the way she sang is the way her daddy spoke, that melody – haunting as the story of the song. The way they brought the strings to the song – just a masterpiece of writing, producing, singing and yea – the way radio took to the song – we all can have the song playing in our head if we have not heard the song in years! Doak

This is one of the very few songs that so depresses me that I usually tune away when it is played … just heard it again tonight on an oldie program.

I _never_ thought about what Anna posted here, about Emmett Till … could it be that the two teens on the bridge threw Emmett over?

I’ve always pictured in my mind that Billy Joe was gay, and it had just come out to his girl, and in those years and that place suicide would be a likely result. But that doesn’t explain throwing something off the bridge.

Oh well, we all see things with the baggage we carry! The song still is so melancholy that it depresses me every time I hear it.

When I was a girl, I assumed that the story was about the boy getting a girl pregnant, and she either had a miscarriage, or they managed their own abortion, and threw that poor little thing off the bridge into the muddy water (that they could not see through).

When the movie came out, I assumed that the idea that they would throw such a thing off the bridge was more scandalous than the boy having gay sex. I thought the guy who wrote the movie knew what was really thrown off the bridge, and used the doll as a symbol for it.

But the song is about “Billie Joe” even though the movie calls it “Billy Joe.” I’m unclear that the original Billie Joe was the male, or that the singer’s character is female (even though it is sung by a woman).

Later, I realized that the Tallahatchie River in the same general vicinity, is the one that Emmett Till was thrown into, at the age of 14, for whistling at a white woman. That happened in 1955. Emmett Till was thrown into the muddy water with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck as a weight, to make him disappear under the water.

In the song, the family sits around the dinner (lunch) table, and talks about food and farming, in between talking about the boy who “never had a lick of sense.”

So many terrible tragedies. And people talked about it around the dinner table, like it was nothing. Maybe there were a few stories all wrapped up in that song, and all about death being hidden in the muddy water, and white people acting like all of it was just not that important.

The singer of the song loses her appetite…she cannot take it like it’s not all that important. And she wants the listener to feel the depth of it, too. Bobby Gentry would have been about 11 the summer 14yo Emmett Till was murdered, somewhere near where Bobby lived.

She couldn’t help but have been painfully impacted by the events of her childhood. And her family may well have talked about poor Emmett Till around the table, as if it was just another thing that happened.

That the song adds about her father dying the next year from a virus, her mother being distraught afterward, but her brother marrying a woman and opening a store (hm, like the store where the white woman worked that Emmett Till talked to?) all suggest that the song is a pastiche of ideas, put together into one song.

Picking flowers and dropping them “into the muddy waters off the Tallahatchie Bridge” very well could have been something Bobby Gentry did, after Emmett Till died, when she was a little girl.

I love all her songs. I was so in love
bobby I was only 12 when that song came out And then I work at a movie house and I show the movie at theater and fell in love with her all over again and I’m still in Love with that Pretty lady!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I saw Bobbie Gentry in the 70s in Las Vegas. The show was called Diamonds and Demin. She came from beneath the stage on some type of lift and she was stunning! I still can remember the electricity of the show and when the lights came up I think every woman in the auditorium felt somewhat lacking! What an amazing talent.

can anyone direct me to or give me detailed information on Capitol Records A&R man and OTBJ producer KELLY GORDON? I know he and BG had a thing for a few years, and wrote, performed together too. He supposedly went to school and his family lived for a while in my hometown in KY. I work at the local history museum and we are looking for information about him and his life and death. Thanks!

One of my all-time favorite songs, the pictures in the songs, I could always visualize that family sitting around the table having dinner, those two kids on a ridge. The entire song paints pictures in my mind – I adapted to scenes I knew in my life growing up in West Virginia.
What would it take and how could they release that 7 minute version of the song??
THANKS for the inspiring article!
Doak

I’ve been tracing the huge money trail of Bobbie Gentry’s O.T.B.J and was surprised to learn of its importance in the foundation of rap and hiphop music. Master blues musican Lou Donaldson was one of many who recorded an instrumental version of the song in 1967. His musical ‘break’ in the performance is considered by many as the pioneering ‘break’ in rap and hiphop. Some of the artists who have sampled the musical movement include Mary J.Blidge, Cyprus Hill,Kanye West, Jay Zee,Timberland, Madonna and over 80 other recording artists. If anyone is interested in listening to his soulful musical interpretation ,it is posted on YouTube.

It was the song that seemed to never stop playing in Mississippi after it came out. People probably forget that writer and director Max Baer (who played Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies) brought the song to the silver screen in 1976. Even then, what was thrown was just a writer’s best guess. They held the opening at the Paramount Theater in Jackson, Miss., where Ms. Gentry, along with the two co-stars, Robby Benson and Glynnis O’Connor, attended. Nice to remember it again.

What I love about Bill DeMain’s piece is that great reminder of the song’s true power, as express by Ms. Gentry herself, is in the “unconscious cruelty” of others. We think of this as a classic story song, but there’s so much life between the lines.

I’ve heard that the mystery around what was thrown of the bridge is actually explained by the verses that were cut by Capitol to reduce the length of the track to 4 minutes. And I’ve heard she’s going to her grave with the answer.

But “Ode to Billy Joe” was the first 45 I ever bought, I’ve played it at gigs probably 100 times, and covered it on my first CD (stream away right here: http://www.jeansynodinos.com/lucky_2003). Such is its power over me.

Bobbie Gentry did not ‘check out’ in 1975. 1976 was a huge year for her. The film adaptation of Ode Billie Joe earned a whopping 50 million at the box office on a 1 million dollar budget. Gentry’s lucrative contract with Warner Brothers gave her a 10% ownership stake in the film. She sold 350,000 records that year too with the single re-issue and album soundtrack. She would hold down mult-million dollar contracts at Howard Hughes casinos for the rest of the decade with lavish performances at The Frontier’ and ‘The Desert Inn’. She turned down an extension on her contract in 1980 to devote herself to her newborn son. Her last television performance was in May , 1981 on an N.B.C mothers day special hosted by Ed McMahon. She sang the broadway song, Mama A Rainbow’ to her own mother ,Ruby, in the audience.

There was far more to Bobbie Gentry than her massive debut(which has sold near 50 million records on a 100+ covers). Her composition, Fancy, has also become a classic thanks in large part to being included on 4 Reba McEntire cd’s with 20 million in sales. The song also has a dozen other covers. Jazz master pianist, Bill Evans, turned her composition’Mornin’ Glory’ into the signature song of his last years. It was the opening track on his historic’Live In Toyko’ concert and album and was said to be one of his all time favorites.